


Memory and Dream

by ninamazing



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Community: dwliterotica, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-03-29
Updated: 2007-03-29
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninamazing/pseuds/ninamazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>"The only way to find out, Rose Tyler," he muttered to himself, running his tongue across his teeth as he sifted through papers on the floor and punched buttons on a screen by the fireplace, "the </em>only<em> only only way to find out what's going on with our ridiculous little story is to take matters into our own hands. Force it to end itself! That's what you do, with a leak, with a loose connection, a twisted wire, a dying world."</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Memory and Dream

**Author's Note:**

> goldy_dollar, jazzfic, and kerrypolka are awesome betas. Any errors, inconsistencies, or general expressions of idiocy remaining in this story are mine alone. Also, if you're interested, this was done off the dwliterotica March Challenge; the related I-Ching prompt is quoted inside.

_Those we thought were friends have gone._

 _To realize we cannot rely on what had seemed trustworthy may be painful, but it is necessary._

 _To depart from or lose all that was known and offered security is nakedness. Such an awful misfortune comes to all at some time. This is the darkest hour ...._ \-- I-Ching Hexagram #23

 

The Doctor hated dreams. It was why he rarely slept.

So many creatures had trouble with reality, but that was mostly because they didn't know much about it. But reality was something the Doctor could always handle. Events had causes and effects; physics worked; good balanced with bad. In dreams, there was no such thing as balance — everything was fluid, and everything was confusing. Dreams were hiccups of biochemical imbalances in the brain: pure emotion, no fact. He hated them, but of course they came regardless.

The familiar part of his brain repeated the same refrain it always did, telling him that Rose Tyler (Defender of the Earth!) was having a grand time discovering her new life, exploring a parallel universe with excitement in her eyes. He tried to picture this, but instead a tiny niggling portion of his mind gave him images of the way Rose had been crying on Dårlig Ulv Stranden — how there was so much giving up in her eyes.

"Doctor," she said softly in the dream, her cheeks wet and mascara running, just like she'd been the last day he saw her — "Doctor, why couldn't you fix it? You've saved the universe millions of times, done thirteen impossible things a day — is it that you didn't want to, Doctor? Did you want to get rid of me? Did you think it was time? Were you just pretending to be sad, when really it was convenient?"

Then her face changed, before he got a chance to respond (even just in a dream, even just with a lie) and now it seemed as though she were talking to herself.

"Guess I should be happy," she remarked, "even if you were pretending. 'Least you acted sad. Sarah-Jane didn't get a real goodbye, and I suppose I did, even if I couldn't touch you.

"Wouldn't have known what to do, touching you, anyway.

"You know, Doctor," she continued, and though he knew somehow that he was asleep it still felt like she was staring him in the face, "the only reason I'd really like to see you one more time is to find out how much of it was true. It was always hard to believe, when you weren't around, and now I feel a little like everything is slipping away. The TARDIS key disappeared — something to do with parallel universe artefacts, probably."

She laughed into her hands, but not because anything was funny. This was another reason the Doctor hated dreams. Of course, he'd hated trying to make a go of it after the Time War, forcing himself to care about the minor disasters of other beings, but this was even worse, because it was happening for the second time — and it happened night after night after night when he just couldn't keep himself awake any more.

"That's silly, though, innit," Rose was saying, in his dream. "Everything's not slipping away. Everything's already gone."

He'd thought he was getting old before, but that was nothing to how ancient he felt now.

 

It wasn't that he missed having someone to flip switches or pull levers, and he could even do the diplomacy stuff on his own if pressed. He'd always been good solo — hadn't he wandered off by himself countless times, and hadn't he refused to come meet Rose's family nearly every time she asked? Hadn't he, most of all, spent hundreds of years traveling alone?

The irritating thing was, though — that wasn't precisely true. He'd always had distractions — er, companions. Friends. New ones erased the memories of old ones, or at least filled in lingering holes, prolonged any introspection or reminisces. Once the regenerations hit, it became even easier to forget; to shed; to push to the back of his mind.

No, it wasn't just that he'd lost a girl he'd gone a few places with, or even that when he walked down any corridor of the TARDIS he always seemed to end up at the door to her room without knowing why. It was that he knew, even as he asked, that had Donna said yes he'd have found a way to chuck her back on Earth within a day. Well, possibly four or five days in her time.

Missing people shouldn't have been this difficult for a thousand-year-old Time Lord. Once you had enough experience with the universe, it was easy enough to keep yourself company in your head — all species tend toward the same traits, really, and when you were as brilliant as the Doctor, it was never hard to accurately predict — or just imagine — what Rose would have said.

It's just she wasn't here, and _didn't_ say it. The Doctor knew as well as anyone what it meant when he found himself all-too-desperately wishing that he could hear her murmur "fanks" again, or feel her bounce in front of him to push open the TARDIS door and see where they'd ended up. He knew, with sinking regret, exactly what to interpret from the times he stared into space and remembered Rose speaking softly to a victim of cruelty or disorientation — and when he sniffed lightly at a loose sweater before tossing it back into her room, he knew it wasn't to check if it was infested with Urklutzian vomit ticks. Memories had been precious before, and dreams had been haunting, but these were both memories and dreams, and he couldn't get rid of them.

He'd been so proud of his resolve lately. His determination against the Wire, his ability to jump out of a regenerative coma and stop the rogue Christmas tree, his fearless and ridiculous promise that he'd collect her from the Daleks — all of it was the Doctor, returning to form, coming back to life. He wasn't surprised — when had he crumpled under pressure before? — just pleased. Battles were starting to seem exciting and meaningful again; the Time War had almost stopped defining him.

It was this, perhaps, that truly bothered him: his sudden uselessness. No iron resolve in the world could open up a door to a parallel universe when there wasn't one. He sometimes liked to think he hadn't seen it all yet, but the Doctor had never been good at believing things that weren't true — and parallel universes, without any reasonable doubt, were end-of-story when-it's-all-said-and-done inescapable prisons. There were a few lost causes, in life. Just a few.

 

"I'm dying," Rose told him, when the second recurring dream came. "When Mickey and Jake left, and Mum and Dad died, I never got to talk about you again. I just took care of little Billy, and kept my stories to myself. Torchwood chucked me, you know. Too many arguments about morality and reservations.

"So now I'm dying, and the worst thing is that my whole life with you is going to die with me, because Doctor, I know you never talk about old companions. I'm not sure if you even remember them."

Of course he wanted to scream _I remember you_ , but this was a dream, and in dreams he had no power.

"I'm scared, a bit," Rose continued, and the minute he heard the crying start in her voice he saw the tears rolling down her face — elegant droplets of salt water that turned into torrents, leaving her eyes red and rubbed and if Rose was capable of being less than gorgeous, they would have been ugly too.

"I know you tried to teach me not to be scared," Rose murmured, apologetic, "but the thing is, I just can't stand the idea of being nothing. _Nothing_. I won't exist. Once I was your friend, and I thought that made me the second-most important person in the universe, but I guess it didn't, 'cause now I'm about to die, and everything that I ever did will be wiped out.

"I wonder if there was ever a point. I thought you'd saved me from mediocrity.

"I wonder if there's an afterlife here, or maybe I'll get to go back to my real universe for the afterlife. You know everything, Doctor. I should have asked you about that."

He didn't like this dream, either. He'd rather die himself — really die, burn through all of his remaining regenerations in one go — than listen to her perform that speech again.

It occurred to him, as he woke up, that maybe he could.

 

The Doctor was sure the information was in the TARDIS library somewhere. Giving up regenerations wasn't unheard of; all he had to do was avoid thinking about the strangeness of _wanting_ to die. Or better still — leave the thought of death alone entirely.

It wasn't that easy. Sometimes, after long days of reading, the Doctor woke up on the floor of his library covered in a thick and unbecoming layer of sweat (and since when did he have three perspiration absorption glands at various points on his body? Why did his Gallifreyan organs constantly feel the need to morph and change purpose depending on sheer biological whim?). Until he realized where he was, his hands were always shaking. He kept hoping the dreams wouldn't come again, but they did, over and over, and after awhile the death dream was the only one that kept repeating.

It had hit him, naturally, somewhere around his third regeneration, that one of these days he would stop converting oxygen and carbon and nitrogen to energy. He'd even stop converting everything else; he'd stop breathing, synthesizing, re-mapping, and otherwise changing the various elements that existed in the universe. He'd die.

At the time it had seemed so far away that he'd forgotten the thought entirely. To be sure, he'd come back to it on occasion, but never in a serious way, never in a way that made him sweat or shake or breathe hard. He was musing, to himself, that he'd so much rather never have chased the Autons to Earth in 2005 and tried to save that dumb little planet full of ignorant plonkers. It would have saved him this, constantly obsessing over thoughts of death and nothingness and the mysteries of the universe that not even he could solve.

But Rose kept asking. He couldn't not answer her.

"The only way to find out, Rose Tyler," he muttered to himself, running his tongue across his teeth as he sifted through papers on the floor and punched buttons on a screen by the fireplace, "the _only_ only only way to find out what's going on with our ridiculous little story is to take matters into our own hands. Force it to end itself! That's what you do, with a leak, with a loose connection, a twisted wire, a dying world.

"That's what I think I'll do now."

It was so much easier than he'd feared, dying once-and-for-all. So much easier.

 

The third dream was better than all the rest, by far. After the third dream, the Doctor completely renounced his position on biochemical hiccups and the absence of cause and effect. In fact, there was no 'after the third dream'. The third dream was the last one he ever had.

"Is this real?" Rose asked, right away, in a reverent whisper. In whatever corporeal form was left to him he grinned, and danced, and even if he didn't really have legs or hands or eyes he still felt and saw himself swinging her around, giving her the chance to fly through the air — just for a moment.

"Maybe we're not meant to care if it's real," he told her (which made her grin back). And then there was a bit about Rose asking him what she was doing there, when — yesterday, or ten years ago, or last night — she'd been a ninety-year-old lady with a crippling case of loneliness. Once she realized, she was very proud of him for not gloating instantly (only that made him gloat), and with ripples of the universe around them, when they felt more awake than they'd ever felt because there was no time, there was no sleep, there was no space, it finally seemed right to kiss the life right out of her.


End file.
